Nüsslein-Volhard, Christiane (1942– )

German geneticist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1995 with Edward Lewis and Eric Wieschaus for their discovery of genes that control the early stages of the body's development. Nüsslein-Volhard did much research on the embryonic development of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. She examined 40,000 random gene mutations for their effect on the fly's development and identified 150 genes. She has since cloned several of those genes and worked out their interactions.

Nüsslein-Volhard performed her experiments to identify all of the genes involved in the development of the fruit fly at the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology at Heidelberg. The mutant strains of flies she created have since been worked on by many other developmental biologists.

She was inspired in the late 1970s by the pioneering work of Edward Lewis, who had identified the transformations in the fruit fly that cause substitution of one segment of the body for another. These transformations were found to be the result of mutations in a gene family called the bithorax complex. Genes at the beginning of the complex were found to control anterior body segments, while genes further down the genetic map controlled more posterior body segments. This work was shown to be of particular importance when it was demonstrated that the gene ordering of this complex is conserved in humans.

Since 1986 she has been director of the genetics division of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen.

In the 1990s Nüsslein-Volhard embarked on a large-scale project using zebrafish instead of fruit flies to generate and classify genetic variations. In 2000 Nüsslein-Volhard's team joined with Artemis Pharmaceuticals in Cologne, on the Tübingen 2000 screen of some 17 million zebrafish. Zebrafish sperm will be exposed to chemical mutagens, and the subsequent mutations will be studied in an effort to discover the mutations of every developmental gene.